Don't Touch (35 page)

“It's for the best,” I say, and I'm so proud of Mandy, I don't even have the decency to wipe the goofy grin off my face.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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The time between Mandy starting to work on my hair and the stage manager calling us to take our places backstage flies—we're freefalling toward the audience, nothing to catch hold of, nothing slowing us down.

“All we can do is tell the story,” Nadia says as we stand in a circle in the green room. “Don't even hope that they like it. It isn't about that. It isn't about you. It's about telling the story. Each person will receive the story differently. That's their right,” Nadia says, and I can't help thinking about how Dad will “receive” the story, whether he'll be there to receive it at all.

Mandy stands next to Nadia. She's sending me crazy-good vibes. And beside me stands Peter. We haven't had much time to talk, but he's like a radiator sending out warmth and concern. The touch tuned him up in my awareness.

As we take hands to pass a silent squeeze around the circle, I leave Ophelia's gloves on. I think I could do it without them. After this afternoon, what harm can one more touch, two more, do? Dad's either in his seat upstairs, or he isn't.

Still . . .

When the squeeze is done, Nadia calls places, but April's at her shoulder saying, “Wait. They need the Gummy Worms.”

Nadia rolls her eyes as she spins away from the circle. “Can't you people do this earlier?”

“It has to be right at places,” April says. “That's tradition.”

She starts passing around the sacred Gummy Worms. Mine's electric green and yellow. “Break a leg,” she whispers as she puts it in my hand. Nadia continues to signal impatience, but April doesn't speed up her pace. “If I can't be in the play as a senior, I'm sure as hell going to see that tradition is observed.”

All around the circle, Gummy Worms dangle over open mouths. Even Livia, who “doesn't believe in” refined sugar, doesn't hesitate. It's magical thinking that the Gummy Worms ensure a good opening night—a superstition everybody can agree on.

“Better eat it,” Peter says. “Bad luck if you don't.”

“I'm trying to stop believing in bad luck.”

“Fair enough,” Peter says, “but you'd better believe April's going to tackle you and shove that thing down your throat if you don't.”

“Fair enough.”

I've never liked Gummy Worms. There's too much resistance, like biting into a finger, but I break this one down into manageable lumps, and there's something comforting about letting it slide down my throat and knowing everyone around me is doing the same. Maybe a little superstition is okay, if it's not mine alone.

The show is a rush. It's impossible to know how it feels for the audience, but from inside, good energy's bouncing around. And a story.

There's a boy who has lost his father. He mourns his loss longer and harder than he's allowed. He doesn't know how to do anything about it without hurting himself. He hurts the girl he loves, or doesn't love, it's hard to tell. And she . . .

She is not me. I get her, get why she does what she does enough to play her. But I don't want to
be
her. She's a sad girl, a sad girl in a bad situation without anybody to help her.

I used to think that was romantic.

I used to picture Ophelia drowning, her skirts spreading around her body, her hair twisting in bits of dead leaves and branches, her face turned up toward the cold sky and waiting. I think she was waiting—
I
was waiting—for Hamlet to run down the hill and scoop her up out of the water, take her away to an island where they could sunbathe naked, make babies, die happy.

Somehow I missed the part of the story where Ophelia dies.

It's fun to play her, knowing I'm not her, knowing she'll end when the story ends, and I'll have myself back, stronger than her.

The acting feels like a ride. I imagine what I need to make the ride start, focus on the differences between Ophelia and me. Ophelia doesn't have a Mom or a Mandy or a dream of an acting career. She has no power—super or otherwise. She's got a bossy brother who leaves and a nutty father who controls her life, and all this life-or-death hope wrapped up in Hamlet.

Mandy's scene is so overwhelming, I'm afraid we'll forget ourselves. When I close my eyes—it might be the warmth from the stage lights, or the audience's bodies compressing the space, or the fact of Peter and me, unsure of each other—the space between his fingers and my skin pulses and crackles with potential energy. I'm sure he'll close the distance this time, but he doesn't. And I cry.

The wall of light at the edge of the stage, the fourth wall, keeps me from seeing whether Dad's sitting next to Mom, or if Jordan sits between them. When I'm on stage, it's easy to be in the moment and let everything else go. But backstage, it's a struggle not to wonder what Dad thinks, what it will be like to see him again. I have to push that away and prepare for the next scene. Always the next scene.

My big scene with Peter is more charged than ever. I'm not sure how Peter feels about me, but I'm certain of Hamlet, how much I love him, how guilty and anxious I feel telling him that it's over, how evil it feels to see his face turn from loving to hateful.

I cling to Peter, try to keep him from walking away. At first, I think, it takes him by surprise. It takes Hamlet by surprise, and he takes me by the shoulders and pushes me down—sit and stay. When he says, “I did love you once,” he does something new: He takes my chin in his hand and squeezes, not enough to hurt, just enough to make it hard to stop looking at him. He holds my face close to his, and I think he might kiss me, that all this might stop. Ophelia might get to move to that island, and the touch I gave Peter this afternoon, uncertain and taboo and SUCH a BIG DEAL, that touch will shrink down to the brush of a cobweb against the hair that stands up on an arm. This kiss will blow it away, and touching will seem as natural as breathing. Everything will be allowed.

But he doesn't kiss me. He lets me go, full of Hamlet's contempt, and the show goes on.

We're supposed to change before going out to meet the audience, and I rush through it. Livia places her hand on my shoulder to say congratulations, and I say it back. I still worry if her finger slipped against my skin. It's silly, but I can't help myself. Dad's outside.

Mandy gets in front of me and opens her arms wide, but when I don't stop getting dressed to hug her, she shimmies her hips side to side, the physical equivalent of a squeal. I shimmy back as I pull up my jeans. “Sorry I'm in such a hurry,” I say. “I haven't seen my dad's face in months.”

As I squeeze past her into the main dressing room, she says, “Caddie, your gloves.”

I'm still wearing Ophelia's. “I know,” I say, but I don't look back. It's like a kid with a blankie; I'm so stressed, they make me feel better.

I rush up the stairs to the door that leads out to the audience, and right outside there's a throng of people swarming Peter. It thrills me for a second to see how impressed they all look. We did it. No
Macbeth
trash talk for us.

I squeeze close to the wall to get around Peter's fans, but he sees me and raises his arms like a touchdown call. “The fair Ophelia!” he yells, and the crowd around him turns toward me and cheers, actually cheers. I clap in Peter's direction, say thanks to the people closest to me, but it's hard to squeeze past them. People want to give me hugs, tell me things.

There must be something, the pinch in my face, telling Peter I don't want this attention, or maybe it's the gloves, but he looks concerned. He looks like he might push his way through the crowd to get to me, but a new wave of people moves between us.

“I'm sorry,” I say to the people blocking me. “I'm sorry, I have to go find my dad.” My shoulders are too hunched, not friendly enough for people who just want to make me feel good.

I get away from them by keeping my head down, by not making eye contact.

“Oh, sweetie,” Mom says when she sees me. She opens her arms, but I don't step into them.

She drops them by her sides. “You were phenomenal.”

I look around. I see Hank's parents squeezing him, April pouring ice into a punch bowl for an after-show reception, Oscar hitting on a girl who winds a strand of curly hair around her pointer finger. Jordan's red eyes.

Dad didn't come. He isn't coming.

“I'm so sorry,” Mom says. “He said it was unavoidable. He sounded so apologetic. One of the machines at his lab broke, and he has to oversee . . .” As I shake my head back and forth, she trails off and reaches for me. I allow her to pull me into a hug because what difference does it make now?

“I'm so, so sorry. I know it's disappointing.”

“It's not your fault,” I say into her hair.

Is it mine?

My eyes pinch. I don't want to cry in front of all these people.

I extricate myself from Mom's arms and mumble, “I'll be back in a minute, okay?”

I want to be backstage. It will be dark and open there now that people have cleared out to the audience. Crowds of people block the doors and the stairs leading onto the stage, so I cut down an aisle to the center and haul myself up, a no-no, but right now I really don't care. I push through the black curtains into a dark, muffled cave. The squeals and congratulations are dampened. Backstage is one black bubble of alone.

I sink down against the concrete wall, squeeze my whole body into one hard, untouchable fist.

I should have guessed he wouldn't come. Could have guessed that he would chicken out, or forget, or tell himself,
I have a lot of work and there'll be other plays
. It's in his nature not to understand what matters to the world outside of Dad.

Something clatters near the backstage entrance closer to the dressing rooms.

“Hello?” It's Peter's voice. “Caddie, are you back here? If you are, please say something, so I know it's worth crashing around in the dark. I don't want to trip and break my neck for nothing.”

“Please don't break your neck,” I say. “I'm here.”

He stomps his way toward me, then stumbles with a sound like wood screeching hard on the floor.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Prop table meet pelvis.”

“Ouch.”

“A narrow miss. Prop tables should have rounded corners, don't you think? If they're going to be sitting around in the dark?”

“That's what glow tape is for.”

“The glow tape has stopped glowing. I think we should fire it.”

“I don't know. I hear the glow-tape union holds a lot of sway.”

“Damned union,” Peter says, and slides down the concrete stage wall to sit by me.

“People are wondering where you went,” he says.

“I'm hiding.”

“Who from?”

“Somebody who's not even here.”

He knows when to be quiet.

“I don't think I'm crazy,” I say, “but if anyone can make me feel crazy, it's my dad.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, for one thing, he doesn't like theater. He doesn't understand why anyone would want to act.”

“Ha. My dad doesn't either.” That's part of Peter's story, one more gap filled in.

“So you understand.”

I feel Peter shift. “Yeah, I do, but I have to give my dad some credit. He still came.”

“I just want to impress him. I want him to see why I care about any of this. But the other part . . .”
is embarrassing
, I think.

“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”

“No. I do. I do want to, and I do have to. You were right; I wasn't fair to you. I complained about you not understanding things, but I didn't try to help you understand it either. When my dad left, that's when I got the bad feeling about touch—the fear. It started with him. When he left.”

“I don't get it.” Then he laughs, because that's the whole point of this talk, to help him get it, and I smile.

“I had this idea,” I say. “It sounds crazy even to me, but it felt real, that all the bad stuff I felt when he left would stay feeling that way if I let him touch me, if I touched anyone. It was kind of like a superstition: that if I touched someone, we would never be a family again.”

Peter thinks a long time before speaking. “But it sort of is that way, right?”

I nod. “I don't believe that they'll ever get back together. I don't even really think they should anymore, but . . .”

“But it's hard to let go of that hope.”

“Something like that. Like I'll be guilty if I do.”

Peter nods. “I can understand that.”

“I know that it's all in my head.”

“But that doesn't make the idea go away.”

“No.”

We sit quietly, side by side, but it's not an awkward silence. I move my shoe close to his boot, tap the toe against his. He rests his toe on mine, and I slide it out, let mine rest on his.

“Thank you for helping me understand,” Peter says. And a thought smacks me—hard; if I were a cartoon, I'd be flattened. At some point, Mom and Dad stopped helping each other understand.

Maybe they tried and they couldn't, or maybe they stopped wanting to try. I've been thinking about it like magic, some kind of a curse, them falling apart. But there's nothing special about it. Coming together, that takes magic maybe, but falling apart—it's the easiest, simplest thing.

Moving a shoe away from a boot.

I swivel away from the wall so I'm facing Peter. I can just pick out his features in the shadowy light that slips between cracks in the curtains. “Hold out your hands,” I say.